Your apartment smells like a wet ashtray. The curtain is half drawn, like the sun itself is punishing you for existing. You've been here for days weeks? in this place that feels like a capsule of personal ruin.

Noel. Fucking Noel.

You lie back down on the couch, your face turned toward the backrest, as if that would be enough to shut the world off. It doesn't. The pain doesn't stop.

And then you hear the door. Not the doorbell, not a polite knock. A slam. Then Liam's boots against the wooden floor, stomping with more anger than urgency.

“What the fuck is this, eh?” You don’t need to look at him to know he’s got his eyebrows furrowed and his lip curled in fury.

You don’t answer. You don’t even move.

“Look at you,” he spits the words like they disgust him. “You’re a fucking mess. And all because of him?”

Liam’s standing in the middle of the chaos, arms crossed, looking at you like you’re a bomb about to go off. “He left you, so what? He was always like that. He was always gonna leave you.”

You give him a bitter half-smile. “Are you done?”

“No,” he snaps, stepping closer. “I’m not done. I’m sick of watching you fall to pieces over someone who never loved you the way I did. Never. You were his, and he was everyone’s. And now that he's gone, he left you like this, broken. And who’s the one who comes to pick you up, eh?”

The air sharpens with his voice, with the truth that burns.

You want to tell him to shut up. That he doesn't get it. That he wasn’t Noel. But nothing comes out. Because Liam has always been there. In the margins, on the nights Noel didn’t come home.

“Noel was a bastard, yeah,” he says, lowering his voice, dragging his feet toward you. “But he wasn’t your whole world. You’ve got me. You always had me. The thing is, you never wanted to see it. Because I wasn’t… him.”